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First time accepted submitter jospoortvliet writes with news of a new openSUSE release. From the release announcement: "Two months of extra stabilization work have resulted into a stellar release, chock-full of goodies, yet stable as you all like it. The latest release of the world's most powerful and flexible Linux Distribution brings you speed-ups across the board with a faster storage layer in Linux 3.4 and accelerated functions in glibc and Qt, giving a more fluid and responsive desktop. The infrastructure below openSUSE has evolved, bringing in newly matured technologies like GRUB2 and Plymouth and the first steps in the direction of a revised and simplified UNIX file system hierarchy. Users will also notice the added polish to existing features bringing an improved user experience all over. The novel Btrfs file system comes with improved error handling and recovery tools. KDE has improved its stability, GNOME 3.4, developing rapidly, brings smooth scrolling to all applications and features a reworked System Settings and Contacts manager while XFCE has an enhanced application finder. Download openSUSE 12.2 from any of our mirrors."

TFS says it runs different desktops; take your pick. The last time I tried Suse was ten years ago. I would have liked it if half of my hardware would have worked (especially the video card). I think I'll give it another try, I have to downgrade kubuntu anyway since the latest upgrade broke Flash, and Amarok now freezes the PC if I leave it running for more than a few days. If Suse gives me trouble I'll just reinstall the earlier kubuntu (I shouldn't have upgraded, it was working fine).

Yes, KNetworkManager has connected to wireless networks without root privileges since forever.

GUI - "some kind of sense" is subjective and vague. Here's a current screenshot from YaST 2.21.24 in openSUSE 12.1: http://i.imgur.com/06QLC.png [imgur.com] Point out what you don't like or what you think needs to be improved.

At least OpenSUSE will let you find out your IPaddr without root access. Try that with Ubuntu! (you can't).

Yes you can. "ifconfig" and "ip address" in a terminal work just fine for a standard user. The network control panels for the different DE's I've used in Ubuntu have always been able to provide this information, as well.

I think you misunderstand what Yast is these days. It's for the quickening of the tasks you might want to do as a sysadmin. Need to enable X forwarding for SSH? You can dig up the location of the config file, find the appropriate line, and type in the appropriate word to enable it (yes, enable, y, or on?) or you can go to Yast, hit SSH, check X forwarding and be done with it.Need to run VNC like an X session? Yast can do it in about 3 seconds. The GUI makes more sense than googling around, editing a config file, cutting/pasting something you found on a forum, and crossing your fingers.TV card not automatically detected? Easy with yast, no sudo modprobing blues.

But that's not the reason to use openSUSE. The reason to use openSUSE is you can go to http://www.susestudio.com and spin your own distro in about 10 minutes running every piece of software you want and no software you don't.

It always made sense to me. It's one of the top 3 reasons I stick with openSuse. The "pattern" concept in recent YaSTs is a little confusing at first (only because it complicates the GUI) - but once you've used it you don't want to go back.

YaST seems to combine the best of Windows style configuration GUI's, with a better view of the underlying mechanisms, and it put's everything in one place in a way that I've not encountered elsewhere in Windows

Such a hoot you losers are. You do understand these are facts don't you? And you mod down FACTS?

Suck it up commies.

Huh? Only one bit was actually numbers (actually somewhat interesting numbers, if true). The rest was opinion -- some of it conflicting. E.g., so does the writer think the speech was a rehash being overly praised, or a strong performance? I can't tell, both are stated.

Anywho, it doesn't matter as it has nothing to do with SuSE. It should be down-moded, as should yours as well as mine. If you want to be a dipshit political nonsense troll, go over to WaPo forums or the DailyKos. You'll have more fun over

There never WAS an official XFCE ISO. There are several way to get XFCE without installing the rest1) Download the DVD and do the installation. During installation you select Other instead of KDE/GNOME and select XFCE or LXDE there2) Do a network install and select XFCE or LXDE just like above2a) http://www.houghi.org/ssh/install.php [houghi.org] and then do the same as above. Basically this is a network install without the iso.3) Wait for http://susestudio.com/ [susestudio.com] to have 12.2 available and make your own image.

Early 12.x releases? There was only 12.1. And release versions are just numbers. They have nothing to do with release version numbers that people think. That is also the reason they stopped using the X.0 release.

People thought that that meant something and it didn't. The first release was 4.2 for S.u.S.E. with version 0.42 version of YaST.

I personally liked 12.1 better then 11.4. So obviously YMMV.

But then I run XFCE and not their flagships KDE or GNOME who are both horrible in my not so humble opinion.

Since there's a whole lot of love here for Gnome 2.x, what's the distro that'll be last standing for that GUI?

Probably RHEL or clones CentOS etc.

E.g. RHEL 6 and CentOS V6, with Gnome 2, are supported until November 2020

If you want something a bit more up-to-date with out of the box multimedia support etc. then the LTS version of Mint with Gnome 2 'clone' MATE is supported until April 2017 (and it's probable/possible MATE will work with the following LTS version, due Apr 2014 and supported until 2019).

> If you hate Gnome 3, it is better to switch to XFCE, or LXDE, or KDE than to cling to an obsolete OS.

i respectfully disagree, GNOME2 (or MATE) has a lot of features that are missing in XFCE and LXDE. Its also had millions of man hours more testing, and so is very stable and works deep into corner cases. In a few years time XFCE or LXDE may catch up with GNOME2 in terms of features (if thats what they want to do (i am not sure it is)), or GNOME3 might be customisable to please the grumpy old men^{tm}. U

It seems that it was worth it to delay the release with few weeks. This 12.2 release works really well on brand new Ultrabook (in this case Samsung Series 5). Recent hardware including Intel HD 4000, and new chipset - I guess it is thanks to Intel's open source drivers (and of course hard work of packagers) that experience is this good.

That's good to hear. I've skipped every other release and only done the upgrade after the system was getting real crusty. I have a nice backup setup now and upgrading every other year or so seems pretty reasonable as long as the system still makes sense. I've stuck with Suse since 1998 or so. Back then it was the distribution that was the most complete out of the box.

I'll wait for the core to stabilize for a few months and then do the update during the winter break. Setting up openSuse 12.1only took a few h

I wish I was joking, but I have clients who insist on running OpenSuSE. I think their justification had something to do with mono... Fortunately I don't manage their servers, so it never comes up except when they lock themselves out.

I've been using ubuntu because their silly alphabet animal names were entertaining. I don't know why i never really thought about opensuse before though. Their little chameleon logo is CUTE AS A BUTTON! I'm a convert!

Maybe I'm just old and grumpy, but all of this fancy new crap that obfuscates the boot process really ticks me off. If a machine has trouble booting, the last thing I want is some fancy gui with a pretty stop-watch ticking endlessly at me, rather than seeing "NFS server foo not responding" in black and white. So now rather than having just the actual problem to fix, I've got to use a second machine to figure out how to shut off the god damned gui (or how to get into the grub menu) before I can even get a hint what the actual problem might be.

I can understand the objection to Plymouth. (Animations on the boot-up screen? Seriously? Are we making a distro for nine-year-old girls now, or what?) Hopefully that's optional.Grub2, however, doesn't seem like a problem to me. It's been in the distro I use (Debian stable) for seven months now, and I've got it on my main workstations at home and at work, two desktops I maintain that are used by other people (*numerous* other people), six special-purpose kiosks (used by the general public), a web serve

I installed the Release Candidate for 12.2 about 3 weeks ago on a new machine. Been really smooth so far. KDE with sandybridge graphics is a really good, glitch free desktop. One amusing issue its the notification applet producing a popup to announce that konsole has rung the bell.

Last Friday I got caught out though. I had created an LVM snapshot of the root file system and it seems the dm_snapshot module has been omitted from initramfs. The kernel won't mount a volume from which a snapshot is derived

I read "revized filesystem heirarchy" and recoiled, this is code word for "Lets change all of the layout to confuse everyone for no good reason becasue we are trying to be cute, using directory names like/OpenSuse System/My Wonderful Applications/Mozilla Firefox/Mozilla Firefox.exe, and/All of My Application Configuration Files/Mozilla Firefox, and all sorts of long names, that are a pain to type, and as well, perhaps confusing things and making things hard to find by failing to keep things well categoriz

This served a purpose. it kept the core utilities seperate from the add-ons, so you had a seperate directory with a core system needed to have a basic running system with a command line, like ls, seperate from all the other stuff like Openoffice and Firefox. You should be able to have a minimum useable system with just/foo directories, for instance. This can help with troubleshooting purposes, and possibly allowing these to be placed in seperate disks, you could copy out/foo and place it on a small disk a

Er, the shebang trick you are looking for is "#!/usr/bin/env bash", and it has been there for like forever. There might be an awful lot of scripts to comb through and fix, because nobody is in the habit of doing shell scripts that way. It's frequently seen in python scripts.

I guess I'll have to bite the bullet and perform this gut wrenching upgrade. I'm presently running 11.3 and they've dropped support for a while now. I just hate the upgrade process.

1. Oh, you should really install from scratch. We wouldn't want anything bad to happen to your upgrade.(and it will)2. Everything you spent days getting to work last time will be broken again. Audio, video, fonts, Plymouth(what the fuck for?)...3. You'll love the way that KDE and Gnome have changed absolutely everything so the de

Gee. Isn't life tough. As I remember from eons ago, Windows is AT LEAST as wrenching. If you're REALLY serious about stability, reliability and freedom from bloat a la systemd, udev, plymouth, la de da, and are willing to invest time up front in return for that continuing stability, allow me to suggest trying out FreeBSD [freebsd.org] or its desktop friendly derivative, PC-BSD [pcbsd.org]. This would require some real dedication to learn the idiosyncracies. Just to clear one thing up, FreeBSD isn't rocket science to install a DE on.

Upstream (the hat that is red) drops software enhancements and some of the new hardware enablement in the middle of year 6, drops minor releases and all new hardware enablement in the middle of year 7, and drops essentially (but not QUITE) everything at the beginning of year 10 - notable security fixes and bug fixes. It is unlikely in the extreme that any downstream guy is going to step up to fill in the voids. They never have so far with RHEL 6.